


Scraps from Gondolin

by thegildedmagpie



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Artists, Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family, Fall of Gondolin, Families of Choice, Family Feels, Gen, Gondolin, Grief/Mourning, Turgon isn't mad he's disappointed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 20:05:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5177942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegildedmagpie/pseuds/thegildedmagpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moments from everyone's favorite doomed city.  <i>Visit soon - and bring the kids!</i></p><p>This is a repository of Gondolin-related snippets, moments pulled out of more ambitious fics I probably won't finish, and suchlike detritus that I do not deem fit for separate-fic status.  Most of it is (at least slightly) angsty.  The vast majority will involve Maeglin, Turgon, or both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Partial Index of the Disorganized Gondolin Archives

**Author's Note:**

> These notes apply to all chapters that were, chapters that are, and chapters that have not yet come to pass:
> 
>  **Character appearances!** In an attempt to de-white-ify the canon a little, I present some First Age characters as darker of skin than the book's descriptions suggest. These include Maeglin, Eöl, and Melian. Similarly, Turgon is golden-haired in some of the Ted Nasmith illustrations and he got stuck in my head that way, so I write him and Aredhel as light blondes (Fingon stays dark-haired).
> 
>  **Character relationships!** I ascribe to the older HoME account that indicates that Turgon would have been pretty pleased to see Maeglin and Idril get together if they'd liked each other better. How do I resolve this with the published _Silmarillion_? Pretty easily, actually: "The Noldor did not wed with kin so near," but Turgon is quite aware that his older brother is in a long-term committed relationship with a cousin, and the Teleri custom is different, so he doesn't think of first-cousin marriages as incestuous, just customarily improper, and this is his damn city.
> 
>  **Fic-specific concerns!** The rating is very likely to change. I will warn for each chapter's specific triggers (undoubtedly there will be some, as I am a real sucker for angst and terribleness). Further questions may be addressed to me on Tumblr as @magpiescholar, as may any requests if someone wants more of this madness.

Chapter 2. **In which Maeglin makes a sword.** His first in Gondolin, in fact.

Chapter 3. **In which Turgon and Maeglin draw people.** My headcanon of artist!Turgon comes out to play with recently-bereaved Maeglin in the playground of peculiarly Noldorin coping mechanisms.

Chapter 4. **AU Interlude: In which Maeglin makes a sword again.** A short moment from a "Maeglin survives somehow" AU that follows on the previous chapter. Marked to be skippable for non-AU fans.

Chapter 5. **In which Turgon has too much faith in people.** It's his tragic flaw, really. A very short contemplation of why Turgon didn't heed Ulmo's warning.

Chapter 6. **In which Turgon gets a sword.** Turgon canonically has a named staff, which suggests to me that he was a quarterstaff fighter primarily. This follow-up to my fic about the aftermath of Fingon's death explores the aspects of Noldorin culture that might have caused him to switch to Glamdring as his primary weapon.


	2. In Which Maeglin Makes a Sword

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Gondolin, Maeglin passes a test at his craft.

The first sword he makes in Gondolin is a test, and it's strange to think his father would take no pride in his passing it.

After the death of his parents, Maeglin found himself in the courtyard of fountains, sitting on the lip of one of the wide, turbulent basins and staring at the point where the branches of the gold and the silver tree so nearly met. He'd wrapped himself closely in his dark cloak, but resisted the urge to huddle on the cold marble bench. From the few times he'd been from home to develop such an instinct, he knew better than to seem vulnerable in a place full of strangers.

The sky had been lightening when his mother died; it had been sunrise when his father was cast from the high walls, and Maeglin remembered the look of the sun's fiery skin touching the peaks with its upper edge when Eöl issued his last curse. When the king's beautiful daughter questioned him as he retreated stone-faced from the scene, there had been light enough for Maeglin to see the trepidation of him on her face. He'd felt no power to speak anything to change this then.

The sun was well up before Turgon found him there. The king's hand on his shoulder was a slight shock, even though Maeglin had seen it coming.

They walked in the gardens of the king's house then, and Turgon told Maeglin that a room was being made ready for him even then – that he hadn't wished to trouble Maeglin with such preparations last night – and Maeglin saw in the latter part of this report an honest grief for Aredhel that unsteadied him a little. Turgon asked Maeglin what he could do and what he enjoyed, a transparent attempt to find something to do with his unlooked-for new kinsman, and Maeglin answered simply and honestly, though in a stark and emotionless tone, that he had always enjoyed wandering with his mother in the woods (Turgon winced almost invisibly) but that his craft was that of his father. The king mentioned at this point that the forge of the master smith which was situated in the crescent of workshops adjacent to the king's house now lay half-tended, as its former master smith, one of the House of the Hammer of Wrath, had been so grievously injured by an accident in his delving for ores that he now walked stooped and limping, and tired quickly from his work. That there would soon need to be a new master smith named.

Maeglin learned this with the silent interest Turgon had expected. Then, at the close of the slightly one-sided conversation, he went to the chamber made ready for him and closed himself in it for six days.

On the seventh day, he answered the fairly-worded summons of the king and came to dinner. Turgon made a place for Maeglin at his left hand, on the other side from his daughter, and attempted once again to involve him in conversation. It was this talk that led him here.

Maeglin checks with a glance that the red-hot pipe of lead adhered to a chamber of his forge has conveyed enough of its heat to the metal within. Were he more accustomed to performing thus for watchers – both Turgon and the scarred master smith Aranwë serve as onlookers – he would make a show of checking with the back of his hand that the temperature had evened, but he knows by the color of the metals that this is the time. He draws forth the sword and, without looking, takes up the second-smallest of the hammers at his disposal. When he raises it and lets it fall he hears the perfect metallic timpani thud of a sword taking on a true and balanced shape while the metal lies soft, pliant, waiting; sparks rise with every blow from the fire contained in the metal. His lips move almost invisibly in the Dwarven chant for a weapon of ideal balance, his body subtly matching its difficult rhythm to the fall of the hammer strokes. Earlier, he sang to the metal of purity and of strength and of perfect array; this was the first time since he arrived that he's spoken Sindarin even the privacy of his own thoughts.

He returns the sword to the fire once the sound of the hammer grows discordant with his voice, the ring of the anvil easily distinguished from the growing ring of the metal being worked by his trained ear, and it takes only a few more strokes at the edge before he plunges it into the metal-salted quench trough, there to temper hard before he sharpens its edge at the diamond-wheel.

This will be the sword that earns him the use of what once was a much older master's own forge, and the former master as his helper. This will be the forge where he crafts the greatest and most famous of Gondolin's seven gates. That will be the gate he betrays to Morgoth, who will be the evil lord who wrenches him from a dearly-bought life as Gondolin's prince to the life of a slave and a doer of wrongs.

Now it is only a sword he is finishing under the eyes of an august king and a master smith too brutally scarred to live again as a whole man, and he is only a boy who has learned several new kinds of pain, but who is not yet too broken that he does not feel the injustice of them – even as he is stubbornly determined to endure and learn and live.


	3. In Which Turgon and Maeglin Draw People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a painful early conversation, Turgon and Maeglin find surprising common ground.

\-   
Maeglin was offered the use of his mother's rooms, but he refused them. Turgon isn't surprised and doesn't blame him – Maeglin watched his mother die there, never having known the light and pleasant place she once made them. The room he's been given instead is a single chamber, but it overlooks a fair courtyard and it's in a quiet place. Turgon thought his quiet sister-son would be troubled by the busier corridors, and he didn't think the glare of the fountain court at midday would be comfortable for someone accustomed to the shadows of Nan Elmoth, even through a high window. 

When Maeglin answers his light knock with a cautious, startled-sounding query, he sees that he was right: the room Turgon enters is cast into soft blue shadow by the light hangings which are drawn closed over the window, even here on the dimmer side of the high tower, even though they've had three days of constant, furious, drumming rain.

“I only wished to see if you were well,” Turgon explains quietly at the boy's look of utter confusion to find the king standing in his doorway. He has a moment's guilt – perhaps it shouldn't have taken so long for him to come here – but he's been trying to give Maeglin space. The boy's seven days shut up in here alone after the execution of his father were a clear enough message that he needs it. Besides, they have been seeing each other at dinner every day for a week. Maeglin has a habit of glancing (sometimes too unsubtly) at what the people of Turgon's court imagine to be the invisible machinations that keep the wheels of the city turning; Turgon has already come to know the keenness of Maeglin's mind by these looks, and he expects Maeglin knows the standing dinner for what it is: an extension of the hand of family to welcome him home.

Turgon comes a little further into the room, noticing how bare it is. A bed with linen hangings, lightly stitched with blue leaves; the soft blue draperies over the window; an armchair, a small chest at the bedside, and the desk where Maeglin is currently sitting half-turned to the door, tensed as if to leap to his feet. (Technically he should be standing, but Turgon isn't going to start teaching him courtly etiquette in his own bedroom.) The furnishings are fair but sparse – there's not even a sheepskin on the floor. Does Maeglin know he's allowed to make this place his own, to add to the furnishings? Turgon decides that he will ask more directly, soon, but for now only says, “Is there anything you need here? I do not know how comfortable you find the place.”

Maeglin shakes his head silently, and there's a faintly haughty question in his uncanny black eyes – uncanny, but Turgon is getting used to his sister-son's Avari looks and sees the heat and beauty in them. With an iron hand he forces down a treacherous thought that's something like _perhaps that is why she looked with favor_ and he needs a distraction from the grief that threatens to take possession of his self-control, so he looks to the top of the desk and finds one.

“You are working?” he murmurs, and he's drawn in closer despite himself. The darkness on Maeglin's fingertips today is not forge-soot (not yet) but the dust of drawing-charcoal; he's been sketching something, the hilt of a blade, Turgon thinks it is. It's detailed with a supple, organic knotted design.

It's almost shocking to see how fine the work is.

“I didn't know you could draw,” he says.

Maeglin is obviously startled, glancing from the page to his uncle and back again. Turgon understands him perfectly this time: _Can't everyone?_ “It is – one of the things my – that I was taught as a smith,” he says. “To judge the balance in one measurement first, before adding another. And to plan.”

His tone is brusque and artless – does he think he cannot mention Eöl? – and Turgon feels his own awkwardness in response as he answers the unspoken question: “I didn't know it was an art you had practiced. Aredhel never – ” a slight catch. “ – never excelled in it.”

Maeglin's eyes flickered to the page. “She said you painted.”

“Did she?” Now the tightness in his throat has more to do with tenderness.

“Yes. She said she wished you might paint her garden.”

Turgon looks away for a moment, fingers flexing a little.

Maeglin asks, “Did you ever …” He trails off, bringing Turgon's attention back to him. Under the king's gaze, Maeglin's eyes drop to the floor, only to gleam upward again from under dark lashes as he visibly struggles to choose words.

It's painful to watch him try. “I speak Sindarin,” Turgon says in the tongue of Beleriand, exquisitely gentle.

The gentleness is not enough to forestall a visible spark. “My mother taught me this tongue from infancy,” Maeglin says in perfect Quenya – the accent is unmistakably Valinorean when he deliberately crisps its edges. “Do I speak it ill?”

“No,” Turgon says courteously, “and I apologize for suggesting so.”

The lack of answering fire seems to unbalance Maeglin again, but he still speaks with painfully correct enunciation rather than lapsing back into his faint accent - which some resembles that common to Thingol's house. “I meant to ask if you had drawn her. I wondered if she looked differently before.”

“Oh.” Turgon takes a breath and passes a hand over his hair, smoothing its smoothness. “Not so different. I am sorry; I have not drawn people for years. Your mother's garden would have been … more to my skill.” He still has a long leather scroll-case in his room containing a number of ink portraits of their kin, but he can't bear to bring those particular memories out into the light just now.

“I see. Thank you.” Maeglin's gaze is back on the desk, his bearing distant and formal, and this is probably what makes Turgon add what is perhaps unwise:

“If you have not been shown, I can teach you how.”

Maeglin looks up at him fully then. He says nothing – but he moves to one side and offers up the charcoal.

Turgon grabs the armchair and drags it over, taking the charcoal stick from Maeglin's fingers, careless of the pale cuff of his robe. Maeglin recoils very slightly as Turgon takes a seat next to him, but Turgon pays it no mind – he's already seen this reaction when someone passes too close to him in the dining room, and Maeglin bristles like a cat if it's commented upon.

“I see you know much already of perspective, and of shadow and proportion,” Turgon says, nodding to the sketch of the sword-hilt, but he moves it out of the way and weights down a clean sheet. “It is the same matter for faces – or the face of a building, or the look of a landscape from a particular angle. What defines a person's countenance is held much in the shape of the eyes, and the distance of their corners from the bridge of the nose.”

Charcoal flickers across the page; Maeglin has sharpened it well, and it fills irises with delicate shading, indicates lashes with grace. After some moments, Maeglin stirs, and exclaims softly in surprise – though Turgon isn't sure he recognizes the word. “That is my – Aredhel?”

“Not quite.” The pencil keeps moving, filling in a stronger jawline that mirrors Turgon's own, turning on its side to smudge in a suggestion of dark braids. “This is our brother, Fingon, the High King of the Noldor.”

Maeglin boldly examines Turgon's face as he works in the precision of the nose, the point of an ear through dark hair, the column of the throat. He's clearly looking for resemblance. Turgon's own features are mild and elegant, where his siblings are a little slimmer, more Vanyarin; one would take Turgon for Aredhel's brother, but she and Fingon are – were – closer in looks.

Out of the corner of his eye, as he thinks through the family features, Turgon starts to identify traces of them in Maeglin's rapt face.

“Here,” he says as he finishes the hasty portrait. “See, it is not hard once you develop an instinct for how distances will look on paper. Would you like to try it? You might start with Ingor, perhaps, my guard.”

Turgon misses the beginning of his council meeting. Someone has to come and find him. When they do finally locate Maeglin's half-open door, they'll see uncle's and nephew's heads bent together, intent on the pictures emerging under their hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The paintings Turgon mentions having tucked away in his room are those described at the end of my "Off Center."


	4. AU Interlude: In Which Maeglin Makes a Sword Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The AU follow-up to the canon-compliant previous chapter.

\-   
It'll be many years later that Maeglin remembers that moment. The blade is before his eyes, only half-here; it has the look and the balance of grained iron, a sword yet unpolished but already deadly, yet something about it feels like … yes. Like pumice. Something one lifts in one's hand expecting weight, to find it half as heavy. It's not air that intrudes between particles of mineral in this shape, though. Nothing so mundane.

The blade is upright before him, and he runs his dark hand along its edge, momentarily obscuring the matter of its making: the quench-water brought at the cost of a hundred slaves' lives from caverns where no tree's root had ever broken the stony vaults. The tortured metals whose essences have been wrung from their very matter. Pinned to the wall by a sharp dagger of _galvorn_ , the sketch from which he worked, a perfect match to what he holds.

“Careful how you handle that,” says that mocking voice which always has the terror of falling rock and the worse horror of a smile twining through its resonant depth. “Or we shall have to find out if I know enough to make you unnecessary.”

“If I am fool enough to let that happen,” Maeglin retorts with the quick eloquence he learned in another, fairer place, “I am fool enough to be useless indeed.”

His companion laughs. “Fair enough. Let me see it?”

In the question there's honest hunger, and Maeglin turns to lay the flat of the blade in the questioner's hand.

Both of them hold it for a moment, feeling the energies that lie deep and cold within the object. They look up at the same moment – Maeglin has to look up further, as the dread Maia overtops him by a fair few inches. Hair like poisoned honey, eyes of evil magma heat, sharp teeth visible within the genuine pleasure of an artist working art. Sauron smiles, and Maeglin's eyes flash back.

“In this,” Sauron says, “we have done some mighty work.”

In a moment like the slice of a whip, Maeglin remembers someone else who was once impressed with his abilities and eager to share in them. Would it be so hard to just admit to the dark, uncomplicated pleasure of having someone who also knows what he's doing recognize what went into this work, recognize the innovation and the skill?

No. It would not be so hard after all. For Maeglin has been through too many complicated twists of self-denial, resisting his feelings, repressing their surge and flare: when he had to accept that the same people who had aided in his torture before Gondolin's fall were meant to be his comrades, his servants or superiors after it; when he was finally walking again after the long fall, and Morgoth swiftly reduced him to crawling once more, made it clear he was showing what the fit lot of a traitor was that he would fear to betray ever again; when he began to realize that he and Havan share sometimes a total, desperate dependence on each other, among the few slaves of Morgoth who are neither of orc nor of Maia kindred; when he once perceived a face he thought he knew among Morgoth's thralls.

“I,” he tells Sauron shortly, “have done some mighty work. _You_ have advised mighty work.”

Sauron laughs easily, with absurd dexterity lifting the hilt out of Maeglin's hand, and Maeglin duck the idle cuff he aims at the elf's ear. Maeglin knows he's amused his lord's lieutenant.

It's a twisted, broken homecoming, but has he ever had a homecoming that was not so?


	5. In Which Turgon Has Too Much Faith in People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After his city's fall, Turgon contemplates the deeper reasons why the last stronghold of the Noldor failed.

\-   
It would be said in later years, in later histories, that he ignored the warning in pride, in vainglory, in fear, in simple stubbornness; and maybe all this was true. 

For he was reluctant to bend to Ulmo, even though he knew Ulmo was the last of the Valar to truly love them, to never abandon the Noldor; there was pride. 

And he was confident in his own governance and in the skills of his people, for had they not raised the fair city? (He looked from the windows of the chamber, seeing his memories of the moon-washed city; yes, it had been an incredible feat.) And the battles they had fought, they had won, and could win another, especially with Maeglin's innovation and skill to bolster the forces; there was vainglory. 

Too, he remembered the icy fangs of the Helcaraxe passage, the cold which had bitten his people, the depths which had swallowed his wife, and when he looked at the deep gardens where sun-warmed, rain-watered soil bore fruit in deep channels hewn in the white rock, he had not had the stomach to face that idea and had chosen the valley over another mountainous flight; there was fear. 

As for stubbornness – well, it was a family trait, was it not? Aredhel had a will of iron and quicksilver; Turgon's was steadier and more turned to the building of beauty and use than to the joy of the hunt, but was no less strong; and Maeglin had outdone them both in firmness.

Turgon knew now that Morgoth had broken Maeglin, but that vaunted family will had snapped instead of bent, and even its shattered fragments remained so firm that Maeglin had spoken nothing that might have given time to escape to those who never asked.

Turgon knew that what he had done was a crime, for he had not inquired after his nephew's absence either.

That poor decision had been quieter and slower, almost making itself. Maeglin did not invite or welcome intimacy; Turgon suspected what the Dark Elf had done to his son and could well imagine what it would be like to have no recourse but Aredhel to share one's heart; and then again, Maeglin was not too many more decades from being grown; all in all, when he did not appeal for attention, it had become easy not to give it to him.

The decision to remain in Gondolin had been both harder and swifter. Turgon had considered. The histories were incorrect in stating that he had not, that pride and vainglory and fear and stubbornness had made the decision for him. He'd looked out on all he had made as he thought. He'd paced and woolgathered and, a hundred times, nearly gone to Idril and to Maeglin to ask the counsel of his children. He'd walked among the people of his city. And that had been what decided him. He saw the hands of his artisans were quick, the arms of his warriors were strong, the designs of his architects were stable, and the plans of his captains were precise. He put his trust in his people. It was neither quick nor easy, but he trusted Gondolin's people.

Harder and swifter that decision had been than the choice of blindness and indulgence, the barely-noticed decision to neglect Maeglin, but sometimes Turgon imagined it was less wrong.


	6. In Which Turgon Gets a Sword

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turgon canonically has a named staff, which suggests to me that he was a quarterstaff fighter primarily. This follow-up to my fic about the aftermath of Fingon's death explores the aspects of Noldorin culture that might have caused him to switch to Glamdring as his primary weapon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The description of Glamdring doesn't reference movie!Glamdring, but Weta Workshop's Aearil, which struck me as a more appropriate blade for Turgon.

Turgon's heartbreak throbs just beneath the surface of his regal calm as he orders the matter of their return. There are widows and orphans and bereaved parents beyond imagining; there's a cruel and terrible mercy in the fact that he need not inform anyone that their beloved has gone missing and now labors for Morgoth or lies upon the reeking piles of the slain. There is no one in Gondolin who is not grieving, and if someone does not return, the truth is assumed.

Idril receives her king home with a white, set face; Turgon enacts a cruelty that will always shame him and scolds her in short tones for not stopping Maeglin from following him to war before he informs her that Fingon has fallen. He forces his voice past the paralysis of his throat to apologize to her later, as they weep together. Maeglin hasn't spoken a word to him since Turgon scolded him in front of Maedhros, Huor, and Hurin in the lull of the battle; but Turgon can't regret it. For the heir to go to battle when the king himself has already gone is bad enough, worse tactics and worse politics than the king choosing to take the field when he's already sent his only heirs to the front lines. On top of that, Maeglin went in secret, so he had no guard, and took his recognizable self to the place where anyone who knew anything of him would first think to look. He's risked himself abominably, and Gondolin's future with it; Turgon hasn't quite forgiven this yet.

But his anger drowns in grief and in horror. So many of his people slain – and Fingon dead in the scorched mire with the rest. He's lost father and brother and sister and been left the eldest of Fingolfin's line; if he falls, only Maeglin and Idril will be left of his immediate kin. 

Still, there is so much to do. Few of Gondolin's women came with him to the battle – someone had to be here to defend the city if the battle went even more ill than it had – but some did, and there are families that were altogether demolished, and there are children he must see given to new caretakers. The business of the city goes on.

Soon the time comes that he is reminded of the need to plan the festivities for the feast-day of Aulë and Yavanna. It seems wrong to celebrate in a city that feels cloaked by the reproach of the abandoned dead. But he knows in his mind, if not in his heart, that this feeling will not lift if they do not carry on with their lives, even now when so many windows are dark and when a walk in the Great Market will so often be accompanied by the sound of soft weeping from a half-open door or the sight of a figure slumped on a step or fountain-edge, overcome by the sight of some tiny reminder of the dead. They made a conscious choice that Gondolin would observe Valinor's traditional days of hope and festivity, even here cut off from the Valar; to abandon that decision now would be to abandon something of what knit them, Noldor and Sindar, together as a people.

Besides, this holy day is marked only by the presentation of gifts one has grown or made to those one loves. When could such an act be more meaningful than now, when those they have left are perforce so much more precious?

It's a subdued evening that marks the city's passage from longer days to longer nights, with trinkets exchanged and tears shed, but Turgon is beginning to hear soft, broken laughter and reminiscing, too, by the time the first course of the modest feast in the royal household is finished. Modest is the board, but well-attended; many, it turned out, were eager to depart their cold hearths and quiet houses to accept the invitation of the king.

Fingon loved this feast-day, Turgon remembers. One year he and Maedhros brewed little casks of terrible beer for everyone they knew; another year, he played a song strung together from couplets he'd wrought, with Maglor's help, for each person in the family; the last year before they left Valinor, he and Aredhel tended a garden of flowers and cut one perfect bloom apiece for everyone: a white rose for Turgon, a golden lily for Indis, a cornflower for Fingolfin.

He's blinking fixedly at his wine-goblet, trying to keep himself together, when he abruptly realizes that Maeglin has just knelt at his feet.

Maeglin is holding a long parcel, and when he has Turgon's startled attention, he begins to speak, just loudly enough for the fallen-quiet assembly to hear if they listen closely. “I know this day is one of hard-won mirth and dearly-bought peace for everyone,” he says, “so I will come to my point more briefly than I otherwise might. I know that you were accustomed to defend your brother in battle with your staff, and that you are deadly with the weapon; and I know that in your grief, the last thing you will have thought of is learning the combat style of another archer who may partner you at war, slaying your foes as you ward off his attackers. 

“But I know I speak for us all when I say I am glad that our king came home – and may he do so again.” Maeglin's movements are graceful when he lays the parcel across Turgon's knees, but stiff when he rises again. His hands are working softly together in front of him, a habit Turgon knows means extreme anxiety.

Turgon can't speak. He swiftly unwraps the cloth of heavy silk which binds the package. He already knows what it is, but the sight of it still takes his breath away:

a blade of steel that ripples like light in the water, engraved with continuous lines from pommel to point that create a supple movement. It's just the length he favors – for he's had training with a sword, for all he and Fingon were a deadly pair with keen bow and whirling stave – and the balance is flawless. The edge is sharp enough that's it's already fraying the silk wrapper. The hilt is made from smooth wood that feels perfect in Turgon's hand, alive and well-suited to his palm. Beech wood, he suspects, though it's painted a rich blue that matches that in his heraldry. But the focal point is not a faceted gem or a proud claim; it's a cut of shimmering shell, alive with the colors of sunlight reflected in a sea-cave, nacreous as a pearl and rippling with hints of red and gold.

How long has Maeglin worked on this? Where did he even get a seashell?

Through tears he didn't know were gathering in his eyes, Turgon looks at Maeglin, standing at a safe distance. The king rises and lifts the blade, feeling the perfection of its weight. “It is beautiful,” he says quietly.

“Its name is Glamdring,” Maeglin replies, meeting Turgon's eyes for the first time since the battle. “And it will defend you well – so I hope I have wrought.”

-

Glamdring does not see real battle until Gondolin's fall, and its hilt is darkened by blood when an orc pulls it from the shoulder of a fire-drake, which was slowed by minor wounds and killed by many tons of falling stone, to number this pretty sword amongst the spoils of the ruined city. But Turgon got to see Maeglin's blade sink home before he fell in the tower just as the dragon did.

Captains of Angband's armies try to bear the thing, and it passes from hand to hand. But somehow the blade always seems to find its way to those who have lost all reliable companions and must face a wicked force alone.

Few of its bearers prevail in the end, but the sword deals enough damage that by the time it comes to the ignominious fate of being traded by trolls for horse-meat, orcs that have survived its ever-keen, unrusted edge will have made the blade a new name.


End file.
